OK I was messing around with my computer. I attached a second hard drive, 600 MB, but I didn't understand the jumpers, the thing is, it didn't have any. Anyway the existing hard drive was set as master with slave present, going my the diagrams on the drive. I attached the 2 drives on the cable and then booted it up, and it got past the "Starting Windows 95..." message, loaded the boot screen, then it said "Error - CD drive not detected", or something along those lines. So I removed the second drive and tried to boot again, and the same message came up. So I then attached a CD drive and the message said "Detected CD drive" or something, but wouldn't go any further. I removed the CD drive so it just had the master hard drive, and it said it didn't detect the CD drive again.

So I can't get any further than these messages with or without a CD drive or slave HD.

The computer is a Pentium 1 166 Mhz, 150 MB hard drive, Windows 95.

I should point out that just before this I opened up the main hard drive to watch the insides in action, but I don't think it's failed yet, even after about 10 years of daily use.

No not SCSI, the hard drives are both IDE and so is the CD ROM drive. I'm not sure what the motherboard is, it's so old, and it was given to me. The original hard drive worked fine. I'm guessing the second one should work because it came out of a computer with similar specification. Also the CD drive worked fine before this happened.

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\'There is only one basic human right, and that is to do as you **** well please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty, to take the consequences.\'

Hmmm... well since your CD ROM dont work anymore i think you may have screwed up the priority settings. I dont know what to tell you any further, but a 600mb hard drive. Thats a very very old hard drive.. so who knows. But i wouldent even worry about that 600mb drive, its pretty much worthless.

Was the hard drive out of a gateway, dell, hp...etc. My dad bought a 40 gig off ebay, and it only came up as 9 gig on my computer (gateway). The hard drive had a little HP sticker on it. So we called gateway and they said you cant mix different companys hard drives, they wont read eachother correctly. It's weird.

when u say, "I should point out that just before this I opened up the main hard drive to watch the insides in action, but I don't think it's failed yet, even after about 10 years of daily use.".... do you literally mean you opened up the hard drive case? and see the disk? kuhz if you did, moisture from your breath can cause all the bad stuff you can think of to your hard drive. i could just be a victim of sarcasm.